“Don’t you dare,” Ginger said, perhaps a little too forcefully. She cut a glance at Michael, who was watching her. “I put that chocolate in that drawer for a rainy day, and it’s not raining.”
“There’s chocolate in your bottom desk drawer?” Emma asked.
“Emma,” Ginger warned, but she knew her friend was already checking. A squeal came through the line a few moments later, and Ginger’s heart dropped to her boots.
“I can’t believe this was in here and you didn’t tell me. I was dying for a treat last night.”
“Clearly, you didn’t die,” Ginger said in a deadpan, wondering if she should’ve just let Michael Anderton hold her hand. At this point, she wasn’t sure which was worse: That, or losing her coveted dark chocolate to her best friend and assistant.
Definitely Michael, she thought. She didn’t want rumors of a relationship with him getting back to Nate.
Oh, no. That couldn’t happen, because she was sure the hopeful cowboy wouldn’t like that. He’d probably back right off and never trust her again. So she listened while Michelle detailed how the coconut and chocolate had hit the spot and then started in on how the bird photography classes had already started to fill into July.
Ginger was bored to tears, but anything was better than trying to ward off Michael’s advances. Plus, while Emma talked and the delivery truck bounced over the dirt road back to the homestead, Ginger could continue her daydreams about kissing the handsome and hardworking Nate Mulbury.
Chapter Eleven
Nate felt the eyes of every single person in the bank on him while he waited for the withdrawal to go through. Of course, there wasn’t a problem, and the woman who brought in the envelope smiled at him like he was one of their VIPs.
In her eyes, he was. He absolutely was, with how much money he had here at the bank and how close his father had been to the man behind the desk in front of him.
“It’s all there?” Sam Wiseman asked.
“I’m sure it is,” Nate said, slipping the envelope into his briefcase. He was planning to leave the whole thing in the locker in the mall, and he’d started praying last night that Ginger wouldn’t ask him about the absence of his briefcase after the drop.
He didn’t see how she wasn’t going to ask. The woman saw everything. So much, that Nate wondered if she had eyes in the back of her head.
She knew everything that happened around the ranch, because she had people everywhere. They all reported to her, and she seemed genuinely interested in their lives as well as making sure they did their jobs to her satisfaction.
His stomach squirmed as he stood and shook hands with Sam. “Good to see you again,” he said, though he didn’t really feel that way. He and Sam had an interesting relationship, because neither of them wanted to see the other ever again.
But they had a partnership that had to be seen through to the end, and Nate had started praying that end would come sooner rather than later.
Sam said nothing, and Nate left his office on the second floor. His briefcase handle felt too hard, but it was probably the way he was strangling it. He felt ridiculous carrying the briefcase at all, but he couldn’t carry around an envelope big enough for a clipboard filled with cash. It had to be concealed somehow.
He also had to get Ginger to the mall somehow. He’d been stewing about it all week while he studied the blueprints for the bird blind and then started to build it. He worked on it alone, so thankfully, when he did something wrong, there was no one there to witness it. He’d put things together, realized they weren’t right, and taken them apart at least ten times over the last few days.
In truth, Nate was tired. So mentally tired. He’d been thinking about this drop for far too long, and he realized another thing prison had afforded him: Peace from so much thinking. Out here in the real world, he had to deal with things he’d left behind previously.
“Hey,” he said when he met Ginger on the first floor. “Can we run to the mall real quick? I need to get my sister a birthday present.” Not entirely a lie. Bethany’s birthday was coming up, and the mall was a perfectly logical place for him to find a gift for her.
“Sure,” she said. “I got a call while you were upstairs though. Can you just run in while I deal with something?”
“Absolutely,” he said, his face filling with a grin. “Something I can help with?”
“No.” She sighed as they left the bank. “Just some paperwork with…something.” She looked at him, clearly flustered by this paperwork.
“That’s so vague,” he said, teasing her.
“Yeah,” she said, sighing again. “It’s your paperwork, Nate. The BOP is saying they didn’t get it, but I mailed it weeks ago.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not.” She went around the hood to the driver’s side. They got in the truck, and she added, “I didn’t make copies.”
“So we’ll just do it again,” he said, knowing how important paperwork was to the Bureau of Prisons.
“We might have to,” she said. “I’m going to call them again. We got cut off when…we got cut off.”
“Fight?” he asked.
“How did you know?”
“Everything stops when there’s a fight,” Nate said, looking out his window, his mind automatically moving far away from his present situation. “Even phone calls about important paperwork.”
She drove the few blocks to the mall, and Nate jumped from the truck. Every step felt like he was committing himself to something deceitful and wrong. He felt like everyone was looking at him strangely, like they knew what he concealed in his briefcase and that he’d served hard time in prison.
He entered the mall and hurried now. There was a virtual reality experience in the mall, and they didn’t allow purses or bags inside. Thus, a couple of rows of lockers had been installed just around the corner from the experience.
He quickly found an available one and put in the quarters required to unlock it. He placed the briefcase inside, checking over both shoulders. His stomach hurt from how clenched it was, and his pulse raced through his veins. No one seemed to care what he was doing.
After closing the locker, a ticket got spit out from the machine, and Nate quickly snapped a picture of it. He wadded up the ticket and threw it in the trash can, then ducked around the next row of lockers and texted the picture to Oscar, along with the word Done.
Then he got the heck out of there and down to the bath store, where he could find something citrus-smelling and soothing for his sister.
He hated sneaking around, and all he could think about was what Ginger would say if she found out. They’d been getting along well since the mishap with the parole officer, and Nate really didn’t want to mess things up between them.
Good luck, he told himself as he checked out with a tube of six bath bombs. It seemed like everything Nate touched blew up at some point, and he anticipated the same would be true with Ginger. He just didn’t know if it would be sooner or later, and if he’d have his heart intact when all the pieces came crashing down.
Nate had his hand in Ginger’s, their mid-morning stroll down a remote road lined with trees about halfway over, when his phone rang. His heartbeat tripled for a second, and he released Ginger’s hand to pull his phone from his back pocket.
“I don’t think it’ll be…” He cut off when he saw Lawrence’s name on the screen. “It’s my lawyer.” He came to a full stop, because he was used to having conversations with his lawyer in private. Even the prison didn’t listen in on legal calls.
He was just glad he hadn’t said Ted’s name. He still hadn’t brought up the idea of having Ginger request another inmate from River Bay to come to the ranch, though his friend behind bars had called twice more.
Three weeks had passed since that initial phone call and his first meeting with his parole officer. Two and a half since he’d left the envelope of money in the locker at the mall. A few days later, he’d found the empty briefcase leaning against the old po
st that held up the mailbox at the end of the lane that led to the ranch.
It was as far as Nate could go on the ranch, and he’d been volunteering to get the mail each morning ever since Oscar had texted to say he’d returned the bag. Nate hadn’t breathed properly until the next day, when he’d found the bag. At least Oscar—or more likely, someone low on his totem pole—hadn’t come down to the house.
Nate had called him standing next to that mailbox and told him to never, ever come to the ranch again. Ever.
Oscar had laughed, but Nate wouldn’t back down until he agreed he wouldn’t come again. Next time, he agreed to leave the briefcase in the locker, where Nate would have to retrieve it before he went to the bank.
How he was going to do that, he had no idea. He couldn’t even think of another reason he needed to go to the mall, though his mind ran around the problem morning and night.
“Lawrence,” he said while Ginger turned around and kept walking. He faced away from her, back the way they’d come, the sun already hot today. It was almost June, and Nate had lived in Texas his whole life. It would be hot from now until at least October. Probably November.
“I found Jane,” Lawrence said, never one to mince words. “She’s in Jamaica, and she’s not interested in returning to the United States.”
Nate frowned, because he couldn’t imagine what kind of mother wouldn’t want her child. “She knows Ward is gone, right?”
“She didn’t know, and I had to tell her,” Lawrence said, and he didn’t sound happy about it. Nate wasn’t sure why. The man seemed to thrive on delivering bad news. “She asked where Connor was—but she called him Conway—and I said Ward had named you the legal guardian. She said great.”
“Great?” Nate shook his head, pure disbelief flowing through him. “That can’t be true. She hated me. And secondly, she knows I went to prison.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lawrence said. “I asked her if she planned to try to get custody of Connor, and she said no. She had no interest in coming back to the US, and she hoped you’d take good care of Connor, because Ward would want that.”
Nate struggled to make sense of everything his lawyer had said. In the end, he said, “All right. Thanks, Lawrence.”
“Sure thing. Hey, how are things on the ranch?”
Nate turned around again and found Ginger down the road about a hundred yards, perched on a tree stump and looking his way. “Great,” he said. He still hadn’t kissed her, and he wondered what he was waiting for. They seemed to find plenty of time to be alone, without the chance of interruption. She sure seemed to like him, and he definitely liked her. In his mind, though, a barrier existed, and he needed to find a way past it before he could lean toward her and hope he didn’t crash and burn.
Nate had lived so much of the past six years on hope alone, and he knew it could sustain a man as easily as it could consume him whole.
“Really great?” Lawrence asked. “Or is this one of those times where you tell me everything is great, but you’ve just gotten beat up by the punk kid who still has a chip on his shoulder?”
Nate chuckled, the laughter just right there beneath his tongue. It had never come that fast before, and Nate sure did like the appearance of it. “No, this isn’t like that,” he said. “It’s really great here. I’m figuring things out slowly, and I actually like the reentry program.”
“Good,” Lawrence said with plenty of surprise in his voice too. “You were skeptical.”
“That I was.” He started walking toward Ginger. “But I actually like the cowboy hat, and working with the horses, and I don’t know. There’s something soothing about this place.”
“I’m glad,” Lawrence said. “Your paperwork was sorted. Will you let Ginger know?”
“Sure,” Nate said. “I should see her later.” Hey, a minute or two was later, wasn’t it? He grinned as he kept walking toward her, the cowboy boots he’d thought he’d never get used to now the most comfortable shoes he’d ever worn.
“Thanks. Well, I hope we don’t have to talk a ton in the future.”
“You’ll take care of all the actual release stuff, though, right?” Nate asked, a moment of trepidation overcoming him.
“Absolutely,” Lawrence said. “But that’s four months from now. We’ll talk then.”
“Sounds good.” The call ended, and Nate re-pocketed his phone. Ginger stood from the stump as he neared, wearing a mask of apprehension on her face.
“What did he want?”
“Don’t you know calls with lawyers are privileged?” he teased.
Ginger’s smile broke through her anxiety, and she swatted at his chest. Nate dodged her futile attempt and instead took her into his arms. He’d never held her like this before, and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, though he’d had girlfriends before.
Girlfriend.
Was that what Ginger was?
Nate’s hope shot toward the sky, and he gazed down at her, glad she wore a flirty smile on her face still. “I asked him to find Jane,” he said soberly. “He did, and she doesn’t want Connor. So he’s really mine. I’m going to adopt him.” Then maybe Connor could call him Dad instead of Uncle Nate.
“Well, I’m going to talk to him about adopting him,” Nate said. “See what he says.”
“He’s only four.”
“Doesn’t mean he can’t think.” Nate looked up and out over the ranch, a sigh of contentment moving through him. “I sure do like it here, Ginger. Thanks for taking me into the residential program.”
She leaned her head against his chest, inching closer to him. He thought he could stand there in the shade and hold her for a good long while, the scent of her flowery perfume filling his nose. “Of course,” she said. “I’m glad I took the gamble again.”
“Would you consider having more of us here?” he asked, his throat almost closing around the question.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On if I can get another guy like you.”
Nate shifted back and looked at her as warmth and excitement dove through him. “Is that right? I guess I’m pretty awesome.”
She giggled to go along with his chuckle, but neither of them continued on for very long.
“I know a guy,” Nate said, his throat so dry. He glanced down at her mouth, and he couldn’t look away. “He’d be great here.”
“I don’t want a guy just like you,” she whispered.
“I don’t want that either,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because then maybe you’d like him more than you like me.”
Ginger shook her head, a soft smile tracing its way across her mouth. Nate slid both hands up her arms to her face, cradling it in his palms. She stilled, and her eyes widened.
“I…can I kiss you?” he asked, his voice little more than a croak.
Ginger seemed to be moving in slow motion as she reached up and took off his cowboy hat. “You can, but not with this on. It’s one of the hazards of being a cowboy.”
“Noted,” he whispered as he lowered his head toward hers. The moment his lips touched hers caused an explosion of sparks to move through his bloodstream, and Nate knew then that there was nothing half so great as kissing Ginger Talbot.
Chapter Twelve
Ginger had never been kissed the way Nate kissed her. The level of care he took with her was exquisite, and she wanted to hold onto the moment for as long as possible. He eventually broke the kiss, and only then did Ginger realize how her heart sprinted in her chest.
She pulled in a breath, because her body had been shocked by such an amazing kiss that her involuntary functions had stalled.
“All right,” Nate said quietly, securing his hand in hers again. He started down the road again, walking slowly the way they always did. She went with him, though she still felt a bit numb. She wasn’t sure why, because her skin felt like someone had injected electricity into her cells.
She crackled with every step, a smile c
urving her mouth and refusing to straighten even when she looked at Nate. He grinned back at her, and Ginger ducked her head again.
“Oh, my hat.” He released her hand and strode back to where she’d dropped it on the ground. She’d meant to hold it for him, but that kiss had literally melted her muscles into marshmallows.
“Sorry,” she said as he came back toward her. “I don’t normally just throw a man’s hat on the ground.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.” He took her hand again, and they continued their walk. When the barn came into sight, he dropped her hand and tucked his in his pocket, the way he’d always done. No one knew they stole away for thirty minutes after she completed her morning chores and before he went out to the bird blinds and fences.
Even if they did, Ginger could simply say she needed privacy to interview Nate for something the BOP wanted. No one had to know anything else.
You won’t be able to keep this secret for long, she thought as Nate tipped his hat at her and went into the equipment shed to get his tools. He’d expressed some frustration with the building aspect of the bird blinds, but when she’d gone out to look at the one he’d completed, it was perfect.
“I rebuilt it four times,” he’d admitted, and Ginger may have started to fall for him then.
Or maybe the slope had become a little slippery when she’d watched him lift Connor above his head and buzz like an airplane as the boy giggled and shrieked with delight. Or when he charmed the children in the riding lessons. Or stood at the window and watched him, Nick, and Spencer load into a pickup truck and go to town for chicken wings and cheese fries.
No matter when it had started, Ginger had definitely started to fall for Nate Mulbury. She’d told herself to go slow, and she’d been pulling on the reins of their relationship for a couple of weeks.
Now that he’d kissed her, Ginger wanted to climb onto the nearest roof and shout the news to the world. Emma would be able to tell something had changed in her, and Ginger decided not to go back to the homestead for lunch like she usually did.
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